Chapter Twenty-Five
The church was crowded with men in suits, ladies dressed in their very best, and children who had been warned not to wiggle, chew gum, or otherwise call attention to themselves. The scent of the perfumes that the ladies were wearing had merged into one cloud of sweetness that made her want to sneeze.
But she couldn’t sneeze. No one could know she was here in the choir loft, watching the spectacle that enfolded before her. No one could know that she just had to see him one last time before he was transformed into a married man with a family. Most of all, no one could know how desperately she wanted something to happen to stop the ceremony before he committed himself forever by saying I do.
There he was at the front of the church, looking unbelievably handsome in his groom’s tuxedo. And his best friend, the cop, was standing next to him, acting as his best man. The organ music swelled and then broke into the triumphant strains of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. The bride was entering the church, and soon she’d be walking down the white-covered aisle to meet him. She was carrying a huge bouquet of lilacs. She could smell their scent all the way up here in the choir loft. They were her favorite flower, and that was just plain wrong. The dark-haired woman she saw below her couldn’t be the bride. She was wearing a low-cut red sweater, a short black skirt, and boots with stiletto heels. This was wrong. She was the bride, not the woman who was walking up the aisle toward Norman. She had to do something to stop the wedding!
She screamed several times to get Norman’s attention, but he didn’t seem to hear her. In desperation, she began pounding her fists against the stained glass window that had suddenly appeared to separate the choir loft from the body of the church.
Row by row, the congregation turned to see her spreadeagled and pounding on the stained glass window. They looked horrified, but she couldn’t help that. She had to stop the wedding. The false bride was going to take him away from her.
And then the cop was running up the stairs to tackle her and snap on cuffs. And now he was leading her away, pulling her forward. But she held back to look down at the false bride and listen as she opened her mouth to speak the words that would seal his fate forever.
“Noooooo!” she shouted again. “Nooooo!”
“Hannah? Wake up, Hannah! You must be dreaming. Are you all right?”
It was Michelle, and Hannah sat bolt upright in bed. “Dreaming,” she repeated.
“Yes. I heard you thrashing around in here. And then you started moaning and crying. When I got to the doorway, you shouted, Noooo! like you were in terrible pain. That must have been a really awful nightmare!”
“Oh, it was,” Hannah said, remembering Norman’s wedding to Doctor Bev in full color, sound, and even smell.
Michelle walked over to sit on the side of the bed. “If you tell me about it, you probably won’t dream it again when you go back to sleep. How about it?”
Hannah didn’t say anything. She just shook her head. Perhaps Michelle was right, but she’d just have to take her chances. There was no way she was going to tell her baby sister that she’d been dreaming the final scene of The Graduate, and she’d botched the ending by going off to jail instead of running away with the man she loved and jumping on a bus in her bridal dress.